A Champion's Tale: Michelle Coombs

Her presents are her health, a loving family, a renewed sense of purpose and a national swimming title.

It's no surprise that Coombs brought a championship home to Newburgh. She was always successful in the classroom and the swimming pool, and she parlayed that into a college athletic scholarship.

However, no one could have predicted the tumult that drove her out of school, out of the sport she loved so much and even threatened her very life.

Coombs was one of the most accomplished swimmers to have come out of Newburgh. She still holds five records in the Newburgh Sharks club program, she won five state championships for Newburgh Free Academy and when she graduated in 2003, she had sectional records and titles galore.

Coombs yearned for a Division I scholarship to pay for her college education and she had her pick of offers. The University of Richmond had caught her fancy as early as her junior year and she signed with the Spiders, convinced she had chosen the right path for her future.

"I wanted to swim for a college with a fantastic swim team," she said. "When I got there, it was completely a case of 'What did you get yourself into?'"

Coombs quickly learned the carefree days of swimming were over as long as Richmond was picking up the $40,000 annual tab for her education. Swimming was now a job, and coach Mark Kredich was her boss.

"I was being paid to swim for this team, and it wasn't about me anymore; it was about making the team look good," Coombs said. "It just wasn't a fun thing for me anymore."

That scared her.

"I just didn't feel like myself," she said. "When I had pressure, I kind of cracked a bit. "¦ I don't think the (other) swimmers intimidated me; I just didn't feel like I was anything special."

The two-a-day workouts — at 5:30 in the morning and again in the afternoon — were long, grueling and repetitive.

"There was nothing exciting about going to practice," Coombs said. "You know exactly what is going to happen, and you are going to get your butt kicked."

Still, the results were there. Coombs set three school relay records and posted four of the fastest sprint times in Richmond history. As a freshman, she won the 200-yard freestyle title and took second in the 100 free at the Atlantic 10 Conference championships. She was voted the A-10 rookie of the year in 2004.

Coombs was also hitting the books late into the night to keep up with the demands of pre-med studies during her freshman year. She started to drink soda at 8 in the morning, hoping the caffeine would keep her awake in classes. When that failed, she even tried holding her eyelids open with her fingers.

"I was kind of unhealthy and I was very sleep deprived," said Coombs, who was relatively healthy throughout her teen years. "That made me get sick, and it was just a huge adjustment factor."

The toll of her freshman year may have led to the life-changing events to come.

Early in the summer, Coombs started to have relapsing bouts of flu-like conditions. Her throat would close up, she had the chills and her body temperature started to fluctuate wildly, jumping up to 103 degrees and then dropping to 94. Antibiotics alleviated the symptoms, but they'd invariably return days after each prescription ran out.

A week after she returned to Richmond, Coombs had a sudden attack that was worse than ever before. A roommate discovered Coombs curled up in bed and crying. She had severe chills, her joints ached and her fever had spiked to 104.7.

"I was like a 5-year-old kid all over again," Coombs said, "wanting my mom to be there every minute."

The campus police showed up first, followed by paramedics. They said Coombs was hallucinating and that she argued with them about going to the hospital because she feared her health insurance wouldn't cover her visit.

"They basically told me I wasn't capable of making a medical decision at that point. They told me I was cooking my organs, and I was in danger of having a seizure if I didn't get medical help," Coombs said.

Coombs has little recollection of what happened right after that. The doctors gave her intravenous medication to reduce her fever and ran a multitude of tests. She spent one day in the hospital, and the doctors reached no conclusion. They told her to rest, and not swim for a while.

Coombs became a prisoner of circumstance. She was quarantined to her room for three days. The pain in her joints prevented her from walking. She developed a severe sensitivity to light, so she would sit alone in the dark with the blinds shut and wearing sunglasses. She said it felt like mononucleosis, but 10 times worse.

Coombs visited numerous specialists who tested her for diseases ranging from West Nile virus to malaria, and the results kept coming back negative. A biopsy studied by the National Institute of Health produced a diagnosis of vasculitis — a disease that causes inflammation of the wall of blood vessels — but only two of three doctors would agree on that.

"I pretended that it was because I was grasping for anything," Coombs said. "I still wonder what it was. Was it some huge allergic reaction to something? That was upsetting and frustrating my sophomore year. I was literally living in fear. Am I doing something from before that made me sick?"

On top of that, Coombs was visiting a back specialist in Washington, D.C., about an injury that had bothered her since 2002. Her tendency to only breathe from the right side during long swims caused an imbalance in neck muscles, which caused her spine to curve a bit to compensate. The result was lower-back pain that made it painful to make turns in the pool.

Coombs missed two weeks of classes and two months of swimming. She had one minor relapse later in her sophomore year, but has passed all of her follow-up medical tests ever since.

The entire health episode left Coombs a changed person.

"I was just miserable overall and it really did show," she said. "It was not much in my swimming but I would come to practice miserable and not happy. One day, coach pulled me into the office and said I was being a cancer to the team. It was hard to hear. I could see it, but I wasn't enjoying swimming at that point."

Coombs said she withdrew into herself and started to feel isolated from the rest of the team. "I didn't feel a lot of support from my teammates," she said.

Regardless, Coombs was part of four winning relay teams at the A-10 meet and posted a second, third and fourth in individual events.

Swimming had been Coombs' world since she was a little girl, and suddenly it was not fun anymore. She finished the season and decided she would leave Richmond in an attempt to repair her academic standing, which dropped from straight A's in high school to a 2.5 grade point average.

SUNY New Paltz coach Brian Williams heard through the grapevine that Coombs was back in the Hudson Valley and was naturally interested. He heard Coombs was having trouble gaining admission (twice, Richmond did not deliver her transcripts) and Williams spoke with the admissions department — she was finally accepted for the January 2006 session. Now, he had to gauge her interest.

Admittedly, Coombs thought she was done with swimming. She did not know if her health would hold up, she wanted to focus on her academics and she was disillusioned about the prospect of swimming again. She told Williams all of this when they happened upon one another at an NFA swim meet.

Williams and Coombs both said they hit it off right away.

"I wasn't going to bug her," he said. "I gave her space, and she had told me in that initial meeting of what had happened to her. Man, that was a long road. I wasn't sure what she wanted to do."

Williams left her with one thought.

"I said it would be a shame to swim all those years and not have a final place to call home," he said.

A year passed before Coombs decided to take a dip.

"I was definitely missing it," she said. "I missed the family feeling that I used to have at Newburgh. I missed the competition. I missed being healthy and working out and being in shape. I missed the ideal of swimming that was in my mind."

By chance, Coombs became friends with Joanna Masterson, an accomplished swimmer who made it to nationals in her final year at New Paltz. Coombs joined Masterson during some training swims, and she liked the way Williams interacted with Masterson.

"I got a feel for Brian's coaching style," she said.

Coombs returned to the pool two or three times a week, each for a couple thousand yards of practice, just to see how it felt. Three weeks later, she made the decision to return to competition in the fall of 2006.

Coombs was the best swimmer on the team from the moment she joined, but it was clear she was not the same swimmer who had left Richmond more than a year earlier.

"She wasn't ready to do everything yet," Williams said. "I promised her we could take it slow to see if this is what she wanted to do."

The workouts at Richmond reached as high as 10,000 yards — at New Paltz, she was kept to half of that. She had a weight training program to strengthen her back. Repairing her psyche, though, had to be done on her own.

"I was scared out of my mind," Coombs laughed. "I felt I had a lot to prove. I wasn't just some washed-up Division I swimmer. I really wanted to have a good time "¦ but there was that competitive drive in me still. (There weren't expectations) for me to be my old self; because of that I am going to prove to everyone that I am my old self and I want to prove it to me."

By time the season started, Coombs was back to her old self.

"She was making national cuts from the moment she was ready to compete. She is just that good." Williams said.

Williams figured Coombs would dominate the SUNY Athletic Conference, and she did all season. At the conference meet, she set three meet records with some eye-popping times, and for the first time both coach and swimmer believed Coombs might be able to challenge for a national title.

Although she qualified for four individual events at nationals, the decision was made to pass on the 200-yard freestyle so she could concentrate on one event per day plus the team relays.

First up at the NCAA Division III championships was the 50 freestyle — the one event that Williams asked Coombs to work on intently because he couldn't fathom why a swimmer who was so good in the 100 freestyle could not do well in the 50. She headed into preliminaries with the third seed (23.72 seconds), came out with the third seed (23.68) and finished third in the final (23.46).

One race, one trophy. The bar was raised.

"If I am going to get third in the 50, I am going to do this or better in the 100 back and 100 freestyle,'' she said.

The next day she repeated her effort in the 100 backstroke, carrying her No. 2 seed and No. 2 prelim finish to a second in the evening final, losing to defending champion Brittany Sasser of Amherst, who smashed her own NCAA record

Two races, two All-American certificates. Not too shabby, she thought.

Her best shot of the weekend was next, but Coombs still had some big decisions to make. She had one year of eligibility remaining, but she was already on course to graduate in the spring. She had rediscovered her joy for swimming and had surpassed any goals she thought possible so there was no unfinished business left for her.

If she was going to leave school, then Coombs would be facing the last swim of her competitive career that evening.

Williams said long before nationals that he would like to have her back for another season, but he was not going to pressure her. But there she was, a half-hour before the final of the 100 freestyle, asking her coach what she should do. Again, he said he would not pressure her.

"Well, I am asking you," she said.

"You should swim," he said.

"Why?"

"Because you can. You applied to grad school, you are going to get into grad school. You will be here. The biggest thing is you are having fun."

Coombs nodded.

"Well, I'm coming back then."

Her teammates shrieked in joy and made her "pinky swear" that she was coming back.

With that big decision out of the way, Coombs had a moment of tremendous clarity and confidence.

Stepping to the starting block, Coombs looked to her right and then to her left, giving the once-over to her chief threats in the 100 freestyle.

"I am going to win this race, no matter what it takes," Coombs thought to herself.

It was a bold thought, especially at a national-level meet, but she had no doubts.

"It was the one moment in my swimming career where I thoroughly, 100 percent believed in myself," she said.

The race itself, some 50-plus seconds in length, still remains a blur to Coombs, even with repeated views of the hand-held video shot by her father, John, in the stands at the University of Houston Rec Center.

"I remember the last lap, bringing it home, and these other girls right next to me," she said. "I remember the pain in my arms and the burning in my legs and my lungs felt like they were going to explode. All I could think about was how it would feel to win."

Coombs swam so hard into the final wall she broke her fingernails.

"There was that inkling, 'Oh my god, I think you just won,'" she said.

Still bobbing in the churning wake, Coombs quickly turned to her right to see the scoreboard and was floored when she saw the No. 1 next to her name in lane five.

"I absolutely lost it," she said. "My teammates and my coach were jumping up and down, so much that they were knocking into people that were standing near them and pushing them over.

"The pain and exhaustion was gone. I hopped out of the pool and ran to them. I am sobbing because I am realizing how far I have come in my swimming career."

Michelle then raced into the lobby, still dripping wet, to meet her parents.

"She ran over to me and grabbed me and embraced me," her father said. "My first impression was I cannot believe how strong she felt. I could feel her back muscles. I could feel her strength."

For John and Lorie Coombs, they had their daughter back.

"It was one of the most wonderful experiences for my wife and myself," John said. "It didn't mean she was a national champion; it meant she was back to who she was. She was back to normal with her health and her confidence. She was the old Michelle again."

True to her pinky promise, Coombs is back for another go-around. It's been a bit tough this season — not because of her health but a demanding post-graduate study program and the various charities and campus club activities she is involved with. She is a student advocate with the disability resource center on campus, helping students with learning and physical disabilities. She is a resident counselor with Family House, a group of shelters in Ulster County working with adolescents who are runaways or have been involved with sexual or physical abuse. She has raised money to fight cancer and to fund church mission work.

The same person who was once labeled a "cancer" by her former coach is putting her life's travails to good use.

"I think the adversity, in and out of swimming, health issues and academically, a lot of the things that I have experienced have made me feel like I can connect "¦ with people who are suffering or struggling," she said. "I made it and you can make it, too."

The SUNYAC championships are in six weeks. The nationals take place a month later. Can she repeat as champion?

"I have much more of a calm in terms of swimming and confidence and everything," she said. "If I really put my mind to it and I love it, I can achieve anything."